Student Number : 8710695F - MA dissertation - School of Arts - Faculty of Humanities / In this dissertation several instances of President Mbeki’s discourse are identified and shown to reveal an excessive attachment, or “passionate attachment” to ‘race’ as a marker of social and political identity. It is proposed that this is a pattern cutting across different (discursive) interventions by the President. The interventions examined include: Letters from the President, Mbeki’s Two Nations’ Theory, Black Economic Empowerment, African Renaissance, Nepad and HIV/AIDS. Several theorists have been referred to in order to begin putting together a conceptual theoretical framework with which to clarify and account for this emergent pattern. The conceptual framework adumbrated here and employed in the analysis of Mbeki’s discourse borrows heavily from Butler and Zizek in particular. The concept of “passionate attachment” comes from Butler and those of “rigid designator” and “social fantasy” from Zizek. Use is made of these theoretical references in order to start accounting for the compulsion that characterizes these discursive interventions which are always in some respect ‘inappropriate’ or in ‘excess’ of expectations. They also seem self enclosed and to play a very specific role in Mbeki’s discourse. It is in this connection that the concepts of “passionate attachment”, “fantasy” and “rigid designator” are deployed.

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences. / Department of Communication

This study aimed to investigate how people with learning disabilities construct accounts of friendship, and manage aspects of a 'spoiled identity' within this. Furthermore it aimed to investigate how the typical processes of friendship formation are affected by the management of such an identity. It was suggested disclosure of personal information can be anxiety provoking for them and the choice of analysis needed to focus on deconstructing their accounts for linguistic devices used to manage difficult issues and then consideration could be given to the functions of these devices. Eight people with mild learning disabilities, four men and four women, were recruited to the study. Having obtained their informed consent each was interviewed using a semi-structured interview schedule focusing upon aspects of friendship formation identified within mainstream literature. In view of the aims of the study it was decided the most appropriate form of analysis would be discourse analysis. At a surface level the experience of the participants mirrored that found in previous research. In addition a number of rhetorical devices were identified. Further consideration of these revealed they were used at times in the interview when either participant or interviewer was attempting to manage an issue related to difference or stigma. In view of this it is argued that managing a stigmatised identity directly impacts upon typical processes of friendship formation. The findings are discussed; consideration is given to service and research implications. It is suggested that awareness of the nature and function of rhetorical devices could facilitate professionals in helping people with learning disabilities to discuss their difficulties and associated emotions in a more meaningful way. Enabling people with learning disabilities to develop higher self-esteem is discussed in relation to them attributing more value to friendships with others with similar disabilities, and the development of the self-advocacy movement.

How do people manage disagreements in conversation? Previous studies of dialogue have shown that the interactional consequences of disagreement are not straightforward. Although often interpreted as face-threatening when performed in an unmitigated manner, disagreement can also encourage novel contributions. This thesis explores how systematically altering the presentation of someone's stance influences the deliberative potential of a dialogue. A corpus analysis of ordinary conversations shows that exposed disagreement occurs rarely, but that speakers can signal a potentially adversarial position in a variety of other ways. One of the most interesting among these is the way people mark their rights to speak about something. Resources such as reported speech and prefacing incongruent content with discourse markers (e.g. 'well') can be important to the management of interpersonal factors. The idea that disagreement is problematic but also useful for deliberation is examined. Using a method that allows fine-grained manipulations of text based dialogues in real-time, agreement and disagreement fragments are inserted into a discussion dialogue. The findings show that inserting exposed disagreement violates the conventions of polite dialogue leading participants to put more effort into the production of their replies, and does not improve levels of deliberation. This raises the question of whether manipulating apparent degrees of speaker commitment might be more important for influencing the quality of deliberation. An experiment was devised which presented oppositional content with differing degrees of 'knowingness'. The findings indicate that marking stance as knowing leads to less guarded exchanges, but does not increase deliberation. Conversely, framing statements as less knowing increases the likelihood that participants consider more alternative viewpoints, thus increasing the deliberative quality of a dialogue. Potential applications include training guidelines for professionals developing tools to support considered debate. Implications for computational argumentation studies include the importance of interpersonal dynamics and stance construction for formulating polite arguments.

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abstract: This dissertation examines racism as discourse and works to explicate, through the examination of historical and contemporary texts, the ways in which racism is maintained and perpetuated in the United States. The project critiques the use of generalized categories, such as alt-right, as an anti-racist tactic and notes that these rigid categories are problematic because they cannot account for the dynamic and rapidly changing nature of racist discourse. The dissertation argues that racist discourse that is categorized as mainstream and fringe both rely upon a fundamental framework of rhetorical strategies that have long been ingrained into the social and political fabric of the United States and are based on the foundational system of white supremacy. The project discusses two of these strategies—projection and stasis diffusion—in case studies that examine their use in texts throughout American history and in mainstream and fringe media. “Everyday White Supremacy” contributes to important academic and societal conversations concerning the how the academy and the public use category to address racism, anti-racist practices, and rhetorical understandings of racist discourse. The project argues for shift away from the use of categorical naming to identify racist groups and people towards the practice of identifying racism as discourse, particularly through its rhetorical strategies. This paradigm shift would encourage scholars, and the general population, to identify racism via the processes by which it is propagated rather than its existence within a person or group / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2018

To date, hypertext and hypermedia research has principally studied the influence of separate features of hypermedia texts on information retrieval. By contrast, this thesis explores the meanings of hypermedia texts and the effects of these meanings on free website exploration. In particular, the study focuses on those meanings which can reveal how information is organised in websites and on the construal of such meanings through the interplay of hyperlinks, visual, verbal, audio and kinetic resources in generically hybrid hypermedia texts. This focus is motivated by research showing that understanding how information is organised in hypermedia texts is crucial for users' successful orientation within them. To achieve its aim, this research studies six websites for children and the navigation paths of fourteen children through one of them, and draws on interviews with the websites' producers and the children. The thesis connects the professional field of hypermedia design with systemic functional theory and systemic functional multimodal discourse analysis (SF MDA). As a result, it offers two tools for hypermedia discourse analysis, which are based on and illustrated through the analyses of five of the websites. The first is the system of HYPERTEXTUAL DISTANCE. Designed to analyse the potential of hyperlinks to reveal, obscure or transcend the textual organisation of a website, this system is built by reconceptualising from a SF MDA perspective a central principle for organising information in websites - website hierarchy. The second tool is the framework for analysing logicosemantic relations in hypermedia. Its categories describe the ideational relations that hold together information presented on the same webpage or on different webpages, which may or may not be hyperlinked with each other. Through the analyses of the sixth website and the navigation paths through it, the thesis exemplifies how both tools, independently and together, can be employed to explore the interdependence of website design and navigation. The discussion of selected results from these analyses, supported by the views of the research participants, identifies ways in which the tools proposed in this thesis can be applied in hypermedia design, evaluation and literacy education and complemented with other tools for hypermedia discourse analysis.

Developments in the theorising of representation and the constitutive nature of language have encouraged an increased scholarly interest in the discursive construction of social identities, relations, and realities. This includes a growing body of literature internationally that focuses on the construction of social groups positioned as Others. However, critical research in this area is more limited in the domestic setting. In Aotearoa/New Zealand, the contemporary construction of social identities is embedded within a specific socio-political and historical context, including a particular colonial context. This context is fundamental to the ways in which social relations between the white settler Self and various Other groups have been, and continue to be, constituted. In this thesis, I have explored the discursive representation of Asian identity in dominant institutional discourses in Aotearoa/New Zealand, with a particular focus on the construction of the Asian as Other. Using critical discourse analysis, contemporary newspaper and parliamentary texts were examined to identify content areas, discursive strategies, and lexical choices involved in the representation of the Asian Other by elite institutions in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Through this process, several recurring manifestations of Asian Otherness were recognised, namely those of Asians as threat, Asian as impermanent, Asian as commodity, and Asian as victim. These representations of the Asian Other embody continuities and contradictions. They function to contribute to contemporary understandings and positionings of Asian individuals and collectives, to the ongoing construction of the Self in Aotearoa/New Zealand, and to the broader national narrative.

This thesis examines the cultural models and discourses that a group of aspiring, primary school teachers in South-East Queensland employed to explain their current world and describe the likely development of their own careers and lives. Thirteen males and fifty-seven females, aged between 15 and 25, were involved in the study. All participants had expressed an interest in preservice teacher training with 77 percent of the cohort currently enrolled in a teacher-training program in the South-East region of Queensland, Australia. This study adopted a multi-method approach to data collection and included informal interviews, scenario planning workshops, focus groups, and a telephone survey. Initial pilot studies, incorporating informal interviews, preceded scenario planning workshops. Four males and eleven females were involved in six scenario planning groups. The scenario planning format, based upon Schwartz (1991), followed a seven-step approach whereby participants formulated and evaluated four possible future scenarios for Australia. These formed the stimulus material for the second stage of the study where thirteen focus groups critically analysed the scenario planning data. Interpretation of the data was underpinned by a framework based on an amalgamation of Gee's (1999) theoretical concepts of acts of meaning, cultural models, and Discourses and Bernstein's (1996) theoretical concepts of classification, framing, and realisation and recognition rules. The respondents exhibited five pre-eminent Discourses. These were a Technologies Discourse, Educational Discourse, Success Discourse, Voyeuristic Discourse, and an Oppositional Discourse. The group's Technologies Discourse was pervasive and influenced their future predictions for Australian society, themselves, and education and was expressed in both positive and negative terms. The respondents spoke of their current and future relationship to technologies in positive terms while they spoke of society's future relationship to technologies in negative terms. Their reactions to technologies were appropriated from two specific cultural resources. In the first instance this appears to be from their personal positive interactions with technologies. In the second instance the group have drawn from Science Fiction Discourses to predict malevolent and controlling technologies of the future. The respondents' Technologies Discourse is also evident in their Educational Discourse. They predict that their future classrooms will be more technological and that they, as teaching professionals, will be technologically literate and proficient. Their past experiences with education and schooling systems has also influenced their Educational Discourse and led them to assume, paradoxically, that while the process of education is and will continue to be a force for change, schools will not evidence a great deal of change in the coming years. The respondents were optimistic and confident about themselves, their current interactions with technologies, their future lives, and their future careers. These dispositions formed part of their Success Discourse and manifested as heroism, idealism, and a belief in utopian personal futures. The respondents' Voyeuristic Discourse assumed limited social engagement and a limited ability to accept responsibility for the past, present, and future. The respondents had adopted an 'onlooker' approach to society. This aspect of their Discourse appeared to be mutable and showed signs of tempering as the respondents matured and became more involved in their teaching careers. Finally, the respondents' Oppositional Discourse clearly delineated between themselves and 'others'. They were users of technologies, teachers, good people, young, privileged, white, Australian, and urban dwelling while 'others' were controllers of technologies, learners, bad people, older or younger, non-privileged, non-Australian, and country dwelling. Current reforms introduced by Education Queensland have stressed the need for a new approach to new times, new economies, and new workplaces. This involves having a capacity to envisage new forms, new structures, and new relationships. 'New times' teaching professionals are change agents who are socially critical, socially responsible, risk takers, able to negotiate a constantly changing knowledge-rich society, flexible, creative, innovative, reflexive, and collaborative (Sachs, 2003). The respondents in this study did not appear to be change agents or future activist teaching professionals (Sachs, 2003). Rather, they were inclined towards reproducing historical, traditional, and conservative social and professional roles as well as practices, and maintaining a safe distance from social and environmental responsibility. Essentially, the group had responded to a period of rapid social and cultural change by placing themselves outside of change forces. Successful educational reform and implementation, such as that being proposed by Education Queensland (2000), demands that all interested stakeholders share a common vision (Fullan, 1993). The respondents' Discourses indicated that they did not exhibit a futures vision beyond their immediate selves. This limited vision was at odds with that being espoused by Education Queensland (2000). This body recognises the importance of being able to envisage, develop, and sustain preferable futures visions and have developed futures oriented curricula with this in mind. Such curricula are said to respond to the changing needs of today's and tomorrow's society by having problem solving and the concept of lifelong learning at the core. The future towards which the respondents aspire is one where lifelong learning and problem solving have little significance beyond their need to stay current with evolving technologies. In reflecting on the respondents' viewpoints and the range of Discourses that they draw upon to accommodate their changing world, I propose a number of recommendations for policy makers and educators. It is recommended that preservice teacher training institutions take up the challenge of equipping future teachers with the skills, knowledges, and dispositions needed to be responsible, reflective, and proactive educators who are able to envisage and work towards preferable visions of schooling and society. Ideally, this could occur through mandatory Futures Studies courses. Currently, Futures Studies courses are not seen as an essential area of study within education degrees and as such preservice teachers are given little opportunity to engage with futures concepts, knowledges, or skills. The success of the scenario planning approach in this thesis and the richness of the issues raised through interactive engagement in imagining possible futures, suggests that all citizens, but particularly teachers, need to enlighten their imaginations more often through such processes.

This study takes a theoretical stance that relies on the notion that cognitive development is predominantly a process of learning. The study rests particularly on the Vygotskian theory that children learn within a social environment by practising cognitive skills, under expert tutelage, that they will later perform independently. If children are to develop skills in reasoning the classroom needs to be a place where reasoning skills are modelled, practised and reinforced. Certain features of interactive discourse may have the effect of emphasising the content of a discussion at the expense of the reasoning process and therefore of the practice of reasoning. This study investigated the interactive discourse of a classroom discussion that had reasoning as the sole objective of the discussion and identified the discourse features that characterised the discussion. One experimental kindergarten group and two experimental grade 1/2 groups were introduced to a reasoning-based approach using the Elfie package. A discussion, based on a children's story, was then held with these groups and with two experimental kindergartens that had received no previous exposure to the reasoning-based approach. Examination was also made of the discourse features of a control kindergarten discussion and a grade 1/2 discussion. Important differences were identified between the discourse features of the control and experimental classrooms. Analyses of the experimental discussions found a lower proportion of teacher utterances that were psuedo questions, and that included evaluation of pupil comments; a higher proportion of teacher invitations to explore the logical implications of an idea; a higher proportion of pupil utterances that were in response to other pupil comments and a higher proportion of pupil utterances that included reasons. Analyses of control discussions found that the prevailing pattern of discourse involved teacher initiation (often a pseudo question) - pupil response - teacher evaluation and re-elicitation. Discussion is included about the role such a pattern plays in emphasising content at the expense of the process of reasoning.